The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines

 I think that The Stepsister Scheme, and the rest of the Princess Novels are supposed to be something like Fractured Fairy Tales, but for adults. I really wanted to love it, as I had already purchased the second  and third books in the series at a library book sale a while back, and didn't want to feel my money was wasted.

This is a story about what happens after "happily ever after". Our heroine is Daniell (Cinderella), who really is living the fairy tale dream of wedded bliss, just past the honeymoon stage, with Prince Armand, but whose happiness is shattered by an assassination attempt by one of her evil stepsisters, who are of course jealous of her good fortune and feel she has stolen "their" prince.

Helping foil the attempt on her life is Talia (Sleeping Beauty), who found her prince to be not so charming, and Snow (Snow White), who is now pursuing a career as a good witch, not a bad witch, in service of Queen Beatrice, who seems to collect the odd fairy tale princesses.  It turns out that Armand has been kidnapped by the stepsisters and dragged off to the Fairy Kingdom, and the three embark on a quest to find him and bring him back.

Aside from some semi-humorous moments, the book didn't really turn out to be as comedic as I'd dreamed, and none of the three ladies really grabbed my attention as strong heroines, or garnered my sympathies. Only dogged determination got me to finish this one, and the sequels will probably remain on my shelves, ignored and dusty.

Codex Born by Jim C. Hines

 Hines begins to do a really interesting thing in this book:

"Electronic books lacked the physical resonance of print. The words were nothing but a collection of zeroes and ones translated into a transient image on whatever screen you used to read them. We had always assumed that e-readers would be useless for libriomancy, that the variety of reading devices and the impermanence of the files would prevent anyone from tapping into that collective belief. Porter researchers wrote dire predictions about the dilution of our magic as more readers moved from print to electronic, whittling away at our pool of , belief."

There's a huge debate raging among bibliophiles these days. Some folks think that only the texture, odor, and smell of an actual printed book contribute deeply and profoundly to the reading experience. Others believe it's just the words, the collection of ideas, the narrative, that matters, and whether it's displayed on a screen or printed on a page makes no difference to the reader's pleasure. Personally, I'm leaning towards the latter camp, though I have wonderful memories of loaded bookshelves and mouldering libraries, antiquarian bookstores piled high with tomes. There's just something to be loved about being able to carry your entire collection of thousands of books on a device no bigger than a single paperback book, you know? I enjoy reading ebooks just as much as I do a traditionally bound chronicle. The debate, however, may shape the future of the reading experience forever. Only time will tell, and I love that Hines is addressing the debate's implications for his world here.

Hines introduces a new character, a teenager named Jeneta, who is serving as an intern to Isaac during summer camp, to help him with his research, and help Hines explore the ebook/libriomancy concept. Unfortunately, he doesn't really follow up on it in this book, though it appears he may do something more interesting later on.

I'm sensing a common plot gimmick here. Isaac encounters some ultra powerful enemy, and he's the only one in place to stop or slow them down, so he does something impulsive, dangerous and borderline stupid, and ends up very nearly dying. Only the magical healing powers of some artifact pulled from a book, the skills of some other libriomancer, or the love of his special dryad can pull him back from the brink of death each time it happens.

The long haul plot arc of the series seems to be about the "destroyers", beings from another reality trying to get into ours and get revenge, acquire bodies to possess, and gain power. Leader of the Porters Gutenberg probably knows more about these creatures than he's sharing. This time, a rogue magician has allied with some of Gutenberg's old enemies - Chinese libriomancers who were followers of the eastern inventor of movable type - to try to resurrect his son, who was one of the libriomancers killed by vampires in the first book, but he's being played for a fool by the destroyers.

Major battles ensue, and Isaac and Lena are right in the thick of things all the way. Still amusing, and it's really fun picking up on the SF and Fantasy references.

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

This has a hint of flavor similar to Heinlein's last couple of novels, The Number of the Beast, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Not from the standpoint of being stylistically like Heinlein, but from the philosophical writing idea that characters and objects in novels are part of a separate, perhaps parallel, reality to our own. At the end of Heinlein's career, he seemed almost to be thumbing his nose at his critics and saying, "Look, I can do whatever I want to with the characters I created, and if I want to have them all show up at a cosmic family reunion and love fest, I will, drat you!"

In Libriomancer, the protagonist, Isaac Vainio belongs to an order called the Porters, founded by Gutenberg himself, which consists mainly of magic users who can draw upon the reality created by the masses of readers of a given story, and pull from its pages pretty much any useful thing they desire, given some intrinsic limits on their power versus the potency of the objects. One of the fun things, from a long time fantasy and science fiction reader's point of view, with this book is recognizing the novels he refers to, which inspires a brief nostalgic moment or two along the way. Probably some of what Hines is going for here.

Isaac works as a librarian (good choice for a libriomancer). The backstory here is that he was training for fieldwork with the Porters and crossed some vaguely defined line within the organization, and has been exiled to a research-only role. When a trio of vampires shows up to attack him and trash the library, Isaac is forced into a more active role investigating why the undead have instigated a war with the Porters...or have they? He's helped in his journey by the surprisingly extant Ponce de Leon, a disgraced Porter, and Lena, a displaced dryad who has the hots for Isaac. As the story moves along, Hines, through Isaac's bumbling efforts, gets to explore the possibilities of libriomancy as Isaac tries things he's too ignorant to know he can't or shouldn't.

I've only read one other book by Hines, the first in a dungeon crawl series, though I have a couple of his paperbacks in my TBR pile, awaiting the acquisition of the first novel in the series before I start. Cleverness and light humour seem to be the key element in his writing, and this one managed to amuse me for a few hours, with a reasonably engaging hero. I've got the sequel on hold at the local library. We'll see how the series shapes up.

Short Takes

(12/17/08) Reading The Last Undercover, written by a former FBI agent, Bob Hamer. Quite amusing.

(1/9/09) Reading Cherryh's latest in the Cyteen/Downbelow Station series - Regenesis - it just goes on and on interminably describing political machinations without any action whatsoever.

(1/21/09) Reading Goblin Quest, by Jim C. Hines - a fairly mindless but amusing dungeon crawling tale.